DailyTech has been able to "acquire" an ATI Radeon HD 4890 video card from one of our sources. Although we don't disclose names in order to protect our sources, we are able to say that the card arrived from Taiwan.

The Radeon HD 4890 features the RV790 core, which we are able to confirm runs at a core clock of 850MHz. We have heard that it is capable of more, but that will be up to individual board partners. The chip is not just an overclocked RV770, as there are a few tweaks and modifications that we are still investigating.

The card also features 1GB of memory via eight GDDR5 chips from Qimonda, which declared insolvency in January. The reference card we have is set to 3900 MHz effective, and we expect most of ATI's board partners to do the same. This provides 124.8 GB/s of bandwidth.

Samsung could emerge as a source for GDDR5 chips if Qimonda is forced to halt production. It recently announced 50nm production of GDDR5 chips, which it claimed was capable of 7 Gb/s.

Pricing and launch dates are still being adjusted at this time. AMD recently tried to lower prices on its Radeon 4870 and 4850 cards, but its board partners believe that the performance of the Radeon 4870 is too good to lower prices further.

The Radeon 4890 will probably be priced moderately above the 4870, but still far below NVIDIA's GTX 280. The GTX 280 should not be confused with the mobile GTX 280M part, which is actually a rebadged GTS 250/9800 GTX+.

There are new drivers coming out next week that will have increased performance for the Radeon 4890 cards, which will invalidate all current benchmarks that have leaked out

More details will be unveiled next week at the Game Developers Conference. DailyTech will be testing the card this weekend.

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